Research Ethics and Research Governance

Although when we started planning the EMULSION study I knew that we would need ethics and governance approvals, I’ll be honest, I didn’t really know what that meant in practice. The navigation of these systems is actually quite difficult and finding the information I needed was quite time consuming.

Occasionally I also hear ethics and governance approvals being referred to only as barriers in the research process to overcome. Whilst this may be the case for very experienced researchers, for us as early career researchers, whilst they were time consuming they also forced us to stop and think about some aspects of the project. I just wanted to take a bit of time as part of the blog to explain their purpose and how to navigate this aspect of project delivery. I should probably explain however that our project in particular was quite complex in this respect as it crossed both the secondary care and primary care settings. That does mean however that no matter where you are planning your own research project, you should find this information useful.